In battle the pirates traditionally would cut the ears off any victim that they personally slew. Then they would string them together as necklaces. The more battles they fight, the longer their string of trophies. When dividing the loot, they would be paid according to the length of their necklace. That is their total number of kills over the years, rather than the last battle. Thus an old hand who kills one person in a battle would be paid more than a newbie who kills two. That was how they got paid. The captain pay them a flat fee of one piece of eight for each trophy on their necklace. In other words, a buck an ear.
Dude, that was horrible. 
Tripler
Oh man, I’m calling the Admiralty office. :smack:
And, it is certainly true that, with all that rotting human flesh dangling from their necks, the atmosphere near them was coarse air.
In one of the Hornblower books, our hero had been captured by the French. Being a gentleman, he was allowed to keep his servant with him. Being a hero, they escaped and stole a boat to sail back to England. On the way back Hornblower’s steward wondered if under the circumstances he was the sole member of the capturing crew and entitled to the full crew share.
Do you have a cite on that? It may have been true for some particular pirates at some particular time*, but it certainly wasn’t true of pirates of the “Golden Age” (early 1700’s).
*although if my recent reading of a very well sourced book on Roberts has taught me anything, it is that much of the legendary viciousness etc of pirates is wildly exaggerated, and that they have been used as bogeymen upon which to hang tall tales of outrageous cruelty for centuries, without foundation in fact.
I just realised I’ve been seriously whooshed. I “got it” about 1/10th of a second after hitting Submit, dang it!
This system is still in use on commercial fishing boats. When I first started fishing (on a small boat), the two crew members and the captain each got one share, and “the boat” got four shares. In that case, the captain owned the boat, and got the “boat share”. The amount of the shares depended on the size of the boat. Nowadays, it’s usually expressed as a percentage.
The captain had grown up in a fishing family in Sicily, and he told me how it was done in the old days. Since nobody in the crew was particularly numerically inclined, and nobody trusted anybody, at the end of the month the captain would get the entire profits in one lira notes. All the crew would gather, and the captain would count round and round the table, “1 lira for you, 1 for you … one for me, seven for the boat” over and over until there wasn’t enough money left to make it around the table.
The remainder of the money was used to purchase as much wine as it would buy, and everyone drank until it was gone …
w.